Look out for big and small breakthroughs that can take you to a higher level, or just to a better place.
Be grateful for the good things in your life. Be grateful when you’ve survived something bad.
And remember: We are not born into the same circumstances, or with the same abilities or talents. And yet, your life remains, to a significant extent, the result of how you play with the cards you were dealt.
Once again, what is life about? It’s a struggle for survival, and for some degree of happiness to make the struggle worth it. And at the end, you hope you don’t die a painful death. And when you are dead, a few people will miss you for a period of time, but the rest of the world will continue as if you were never alive.
These are cold, hard facts.
But one is tempted to wonder if the pill is not a little too black to swallow.
The key is in the degree of luck.
There are also different degrees of survival. If you are optimistic and you believe in the wide range of possibilities available to lead a good life, your survival can be relatively comfortable – from the food you feast on three to five times a day, to the drinks you pour down your throat, to the bedding you sleep under, and the amount of time you spend exploring the world and with your loved ones and friends.
The quality of your survival also contributes to your sense of happiness.
And if you assist other people in their struggle for survival and their efforts to make life worth living, it increases your own awareness of a life worth living.
However, the ending is usually not your choice.
Which makes it that much more important to be happy before the end comes – slow and gruelling, or mercifully quick.
To build on a thought from last week or so: If you look at most people in their middle years or later, it’s clear that they never became superstars. They may be “superstars” to their families, but very few people end up with exceptional talents and achievements in any area, much less in more than one area – such as sports and art, or engineering and cooking.
The other part of the thought is that even people who achieve superstar status sometimes do more harm than good. Despite all their achievements and prizes and status.
So even though you never achieved superstar status, never won any prizes for your work, never achieved much in any field, but it can also be said that you did little harm to other people, to animals, and to the environment, I think it’s entirely appropriate to say that you can hold your head high – you’ve done well.
MONDAY, 24 JANUARY 2022
Point 1. As already mentioned, very few people become superstars. Only a select group of people achieve more than one or two of the things they once set out to do or hoped to achieve.
Point 2. One person criticises another for his unimpressive income and low contribution to a common cause. Asks the latter: “Are you making as much money as you possibly can? Are you doing everything in your power to get more done? Why don’t you make more money? Too busy enjoying life? Can’t figure out how? Tried but failed? Tried but didn’t try hard enough?”
Point 3. Few people create income opportunities out of thin air. Most people accept opportunities offered to them, and then they work hard to maintain these sources of income. But did they create the opportunity for themselves? No.
Point 4. What does happen is that people prepare to profit from existing opportunities by training in a certain field and by gaining certain knowledge.
* * *
I. Identify a good opportunity – for you. People’s needs and desires are all opportunities.
II. Get trained or gain experience in a particular opportunity field. Then set yourself up to profit from existing opportunities. (Training doesn’t happen overnight. If you’re twenty, you have the option to get trained for several things. If you’re fifty, you can still get trained or develop skills yourself, but you’re more likely to look at what you’re already trained for, or at what you’re already experienced in.)
III. I initially thought that 99% of all the money I made in my life came from opportunities that were presented to me – from people asking me if I was interested in a position in a gift shop when I was a student to people in Taiwan walking up to me or calling me at home or knocking on my door and asking me if I had time for another English class. Then about a minute ago I realised: I was set up for the opportunities, in the case of the latter examples, by coming to Taiwan and being contactable.
Another thing: Most people don’t hustle on a street corner for money. Strangely enough, the only people who do this, who make cold calls and ask people for money, are beggars – who are seen as being on the lowest rung of the economic hierarchy. I wanted to say that street vendors hustle too, but they also set themselves up for opportunity: people walking past them who happen to want, or need what they are selling – “I’m hungry, and here’s a guy selling hot dogs”.
We took old Fat Guy to the vet for the last time yesterday afternoon, Wednesday, 10 November 2021.
He vomited badly in August. We thought it was the end. He’s fifteen years old this year, so we had been thinking for quite a while he may not be with us for another year.
However, he recovered quickly, jumped on the furniture again, ate his usual amount of food, and so on.
Sunday, 3 October, he had a similar bout of throwing up. This time it was worse. We didn’t think he was going to see the end of the day. The next morning, I saw a dead pigeon on the sidewalk. “Death is in the air,” I thought.
We took him to the vet in the afternoon, and after a cursory physical examination and a blood test, the vet declared that he had kidney disease, and that he only had a twenty percent chance of recovering. We left him at the clinic for three days to get some fluids. There was no certainty that he would come home again.
Three days later we brought him back. He was uncertain on his feet, and after a few rounds through the apartment decided on the floor to the left of the bed in the master bedroom as his last domain.
That’s where he stayed for the next five weeks.
We took him back to the vet every two days for fluids and the occasional vitamin injection.
Some days he ate well and drank enough water; some days he just stared ahead and slept. The first week of November, I told the vet’s assistant that he was stable, walking around a bit, and that I had seen him eat and drink a few times. He didn’t always make it to the cat litter, and he leaked a bit, so his sleeping area had to be cleaned regularly.
Sunday, 7 November 2021 was the first time we saw blood in his faeces. And not a little. It was bad.
By Tuesday, he was no longer eating. It also got cooler again, and luckily, he didn’t get up to lie down on the cold tiles when we put him on a cloth towel for comfort with some paper towels for hygiene.
We took him to the vet again, and again touched on the subject of euthanasia.
We decided on either Wednesday or Friday. An article on the Internet quoted a veterinarian as saying that giving an animal its final injection is one of the easiest aspects of his job, as he brings relief to a terminally ill animal. He also said it was one of the last expressions of compassion the owner could give to a beloved pet.
By Tuesday night, I suggested that we don’t postpone any longer. Natasja let the vet know early the next morning.
I’m a bit of a weakling with these matters. When we decided the hour had come, I picked him up from the floor and put him in his cat carrier for the last time. He just murmured a little.
At the vet we took him out and placed him on the table. I caressed his head a few more times … and then decided to step away.
The vet gave him an anaesthetic, and about three seconds later his head dipped. Then, with a larger syringe with yellow-orange fluid in his hand, the vet asked us if we were sure we wanted to continue. We nodded. Then he injected him. I walked away to the sink.
We stood around for a few minutes. The staff spoke. Natasja spoke. The vet spoke. I asked how long it would take before it was over. Natasja asked more specifically how long it would take for his heart to stop. The woman we spoke to the most said that it was over. His heart had already stopped.
We draped one of his favourite blankets over him. The staff placed his body in a new cardboard box and explained the cremation process.
We paid the necessary fees and thanked everyone for their help.
And drove home with the empty cat carrier.
A pet is one of those things that makes life worth living – specifically the sadness, and the loneliness, and the worries that are sometimes part of one’s everyday existence.
Sometimes someone makes a choice, and it can only be described as the worse of, let’s say two options. With regard to this person’s decision, I also have a choice: to try and understand why the person made a particular choice, or not to try and understand.
If I manage to understand why someone made the worst of two choices and explain it to a third party, the latter may be tempted to say, “But that’s not an excuse,” and that I am defending that person.
My answer is that just because I understand why someone made a bad choice doesn’t suddenly make the choice less bad. A bad choice is a bad choice, whether you understand what motivated the person or not. But I also believe that the choice to not want to understand why someone made a bad choice is also the worst of two options.
